As a new branch of technologies. Deployment time would be calculated from actual components. Also you would have systems representing life boats and emergency systems, to prevent crew losses either when damages are taken (additional bulwarks, but also perhaps infirmaries) and systems for when there is a catastrophic failure (escape pods of various quality, autonomy and resistance).
I would not mind a bit more detail to how crew work in the game with things such a crew rotation during overhauls and rest, more emphasis on crew security and a but more detailed or fleshed out ship boarding combat mechanics.
I always cringe by the fact that you can get perfect order reaction times with max fleet training for example... there should NEVER be a possibility of 100% of the time get instant reaction to any orders. There should always be some differences to this based on crew grade, tactical officer skill and overall fleet training. I also believe that fleet training should impact more stuff than just reaction... it should probably impact chances of maintenance failure to some small degree and perhaps a few other things too.
Having a healthy crew with high morale should be important and overall security should perhaps impact crew morale quite a bit.
We have damage control that could be modified by crew grade and ship security in addition to damage control systems. I would like to see damage control to be expanded a bit where internal damage becomes more common even if a ships armour or shield are not breached. So a ship with good damage control and efficient crew space can be critical to keeping a ship firing during combat all the time. There could be something called a shock value where ships crew become inactive for short periods of time due to being fired upon... which could then make splitting fire actually be more important as it often have been in the real world.
Crew could simply misinterpret an order too or panic and fire on something the player don't want them to fire at. People and ships (especially during naval gun eras) tended to fire on whatever fired on them or was the closest.
In any way.... some more variety and detail to crew spaces, adding crew morale to more functionality and repurposed what crew grade and fleet training does to a ship.
Having really long deployment times really impacting crew performance in different ways would be interesting in my opinion than just space it takes up on the ships.
Simply make crew more important for the functionality of a ship, it really is in reality.
